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Biography

About

Most writing about mushroom lore today is secondhand. His isn’t. Forty-plus firsthand trips to the Arctic and Subarctic, a species of fungus that carries his name, and government-commissioned fieldwork in Nunavik that predates the current interest in fungal culture by close to twenty years.

Lawrence Millman is an author, ethnographer, and mycologist who lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is the author of more than twenty books and has made more than forty trips and expeditions to the Arctic and Subarctic.

At Fresh Pond in Cambridge he has recorded 399 species since 2005. He donates many specimens to Harvard’s Farlow Herbarium. Earlier published counts were 321 in 2019 (Lapham’s Quarterly) and 367 in October 2023 (Cambridge Day).

In his own words

I'm a perpetual outsider. To learn about this, check out my memoir Outsider, which describes not only how I'm outside every known social group, but also that I tend to venture out-of-doors whenever possible. Now consider my mycological self. I've devoted that self to searching for mushrooms all around the world, including remote places like Siberia's Wrangel Island and the Caribbean island of Mayaguana. To do this, one can't remain indoors.

Here I should say that remoteness holds a particular attraction to me. A remote place, even a cold remote place, warms the cockles of my heart, and I can't help but write about it. I especially delight in writing about places that haven't yet given up the ghost to the demons of globalization. Consider the island of Palau Run in eastern Indonesia, where a fellow said to me, "Amer-i-ca? Is that a big island or a small island?" What a paradise he inhabited!

I should also mention that I'm opposed to the current phenomenon called technology. It's a real pity that computers have replaced the human brain, that TVs have replaced storytelling (see my essay "The Monster"), and that AI is now replacing RI — real intelligence. Check out my book A Luddite Lexicon if you want to read more about this subject, which, believe it or not, I often purvey in a jocular manner.

One of the few non-horrific examples of technology happens to be the online platform known as Substack. It is much more likely to be encountered than a (for example) sasquatch, for it has become quite popular nowadays among writers, including those writers like yours truly who've been banished by their publishers because they don't write plump romances in which political correctness triumphs over all.

His mother was an avid naturalist. Growing up in Kansas City, his first devotion was seashells, especially the ones the field guides left out.

How he works in the field is on the Standards page. Common questions are answered under Questions.

Career

  • He has taught at the University of Iceland, the University of New Hampshire, and Tufts University (Trinity University Press).
  • Guggenheim Fellowship, Fulbright Fellowship, Lowell Thomas Award, Northern Lights Award, and P.E.N. Hemingway Award Finalist (Trinity University Press; MacDowell).
  • “I left the Explorers Club because it became the Exploiters Club.”
  • Anthologized in Best American Travel Writing three years in a row (MacDowell).
  • Bylines include Smithsonian, National Geographic Adventure, The Atlantic Monthly, Sports Illustrated, and Islands (MacDowell).
  • Fungi studied in Honduras, Greenland, Nantucket, Panama, Western Samoa, Iceland, Bermuda, the Canadian Arctic, and Fresh Pond (Lapham’s Quarterly).
  • Inonotus millmanii, a Puerto Rico polypore, was named in his honor by Leif Ryvarden (Index Fungorum IF 557650).
  • With Bill Neill in 2006, in New Hampshire, *Echinodontium ballouii*, a fungus considered extinct for almost a hundred years (The Harvard Crimson).
  • Reading and signing at Belmont Public Library, July 2026 (The Boston Globe).
  • Book talk at Thoreau Farm.
  • Author talk at Falmouth Public Library.
  • Fungipedia event at Porter Square Books, 1 November 2019.

Praise

Lawrence Millman in a forest, holding a large bolete.
Lawrence with a bolete.